brickclubfandomcom-20200213-history
1.3.9-Kingedmundsroyalmurder
Brick!club chapter 9: of bad jokes and condescention And so the moment of happiness comes to an end and we prepare to be plunged back into abject misery. I’m not certain if it’s my sense of humor or theirs that is lacking here because I don’t find the “surprise” terribly funny. Even without the ‘Fantine is in love and there’s a kid’ aspect it’s just… not particularly funny. I dunno, much as I adore our ladies here, I do have to wonder about their humor threshold because it seems startlingly low. Anyway. The boys leave with only a letter to say goodbye. Hugo feels the need to remind us that Favourite can read, just in case we’d forgotten in the seven chapters or so since he last mentioned it. Tholomyes compares himself to the prodigal son and I roll my eyes. He’s quite excellent at insulting the girls even as he compliments them and I once again lament Fantine’s tendency to pick the worst people to trust. This is also the second reference to the non-Amis Bossuet and it makes me giggle slightly every time. So yeah, after two years all they get is a letter and a nice (maybe) dinner. While I appreciate the hint of sentiment behind ‘if this letter tears you up do the same to it’ in that it allows that maybe, just maybe, the girls might be upset about this, it mostly assumes that commitment is not a thing and the girls are just toys to be discarded with careless abandon. (Also: do we think that they’re actually going back to their parents, or is this just a flimsy premise? I’m thinking the latter, since Tholomyes’ parents don’t seem to have minded his being eternally in Paris before.) And then we get the punchline of this entire section: Cosette is not only conceived but has actually been born. I’m going to suggest that the other women actually know about her and this is one of the reasons they treat Fantine like they do. She’s made a serious mistake, though it probably wasn’t her fault, and still she seems to think herself more virtuous than them. This does suggest deliberate blindness on their part, but that doesn’t seem hard to believe. And Fantine doesn’t really seem up to defending herself much. She’s more the bow your head and take it kind of person, which I totally empathize with. So we have the child and now we have no husband or even a potential husband. And the reasons why she stayed with him are suddenly clearer: it seems highly unlikely that some young student looking for a good time will want a woman with a kid, and someone looking to marry and settle down probably also doesn’t want to be saddled with someone else’s child. She really didn’t have that many options, poor dear. I love the Tholomyes gave Cosette her full name theory. Adopting it as headcanon. I also really appreciate that Hugo also has pacing problems, because it makes me feel slightly better about mine. (Not the, ‘have a random book about Waterloo’ kind, but the ‘what with one thing and another three years passed’ kind, though in this case it was just an hour.) Commentary Sarah1281 I don’t think Fantine is mercenary enough to have tried to get a man to support Cosette and she did inexplicably still love Tholomyes. I believe that the parent story was true because this whole thing started with Tholomyes noting that the girls had been after them to surprise them and they failed to deliver but were still being hounded for an entire freaking year (something I think reflects badly on both parties as the girls really should have accepted it was never going to happen at this point and the boys should have thrown them a bone) and that their parents wanted them to go home and grow up and he had a brilliant way to combine these two things that really did not need combining. I mean, how did that planning session even go? “I know, we can surprise them by just ditching them and never allowing any contact ever again! It will be great!” Doeskin-pantaloons (reply to Sarah1281) I’m willing to believe, not that Fantine is that mercenary as such, but that she was partly still with Tholomyes for the money. Like, she might occasionally look at him and go, “God, what a jerk. I should leave him,” and then she’ll look at Cosette, and think, “But then what would we do?” and then she’ll angst, and she’ll never actually bring it up with him for Cosette’s sake. But then again Fantine just has the worst taste in people so who really knows. Sarah1281 (reply to Doeskin-pantaloons' reply) I just had a thought…What if it’s not so much that she has the worst taste in people (though she does seem to attract all of the bad ones) and more that she has never been personally touched by any of the good ones? She’s not being treated the greatest by the people in her life but what sort of comparison does she have? She’s so insignificant she was named by some random guy walking by. Doeskin-pantaloons (reply to Sarah1281's reply) Oh God, so she’s basically just like, “Yep. This is what people do. This isn’t bad people. This is just regular people doing regular people things.” Oh God, so much sad.